James Overland 2004 :

When scientists trained their analytical tools on the North Pole and its environs, they quantified the local knowledge: The polar ice cap is 40 percent thinner and millions of acres smaller than it was in the 1970s.

What happens at the North Pole can affect the rest of the planet, potentially altering the course of the Gulf Stream, which moderates climate from the East Coast of the United States to the British Isles. Closer to home, the jet stream that dictates much of Seattle’s weather can be diverted when the polar vortex speeds up.

“It’s probably contributing to the fact that it’s warmer and we’ve been getting less snow,” Overland said.

James Overland 2011 :

Our region experienced record snowfall last winter, topping the charts dating at least as far back as the late 1800s. In all, more than six feet of snow fell at sites such as Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Extreme weather nailed other U.S. cities last winter, too, and swaths of Europe saw unprecedented snowfalls and record cold temperatures. This year, the nation’s capital has suffered one unusually severe storm. Parts of the East Coast from Atlanta to Boston have been experiencing blizzard conditions. Last week, a vast swath of the country’s midsection and East Coast got deluged with sleet and snow, paralyzing travel. What gives?

To understand how warming and snowstorms may be connected, it helps to start with the epicenter of winter weather. Around the North Pole, some of the world’s coldest air currents blow in what’s typically a tight loop known as the polar vortex. Air masses inside the vortex tend to have not only low temperatures but also low barometric pressures compared with air outside the vortex. The surrounding high-pressure zones push in on the vortex from all sides, helping the cold air stay where it belongs, at the top of the world.

……

The root of the problem, Overland says, is melting sea ice. Sea ice forms in the Arctic Ocean during the cold, dark days of fall and winter and hangs around, melting slowly but not completely vanishing, throughout the summer. In recent years, more sea ice has melted during the warm months than can be replenished during the chillier ones.

Absolute nonsense mixed with a number of falsehoods. Generally the ice extent has been replenishing at normal levels. Albeit for the last 20 years the melt has been a bit earlier and the build up a bit later. Ice depth or mass is near normal. The loss of extent seems attributable to the winds that prevail in the warm cycle of the PDO.
Atmospheric moisture is higher during warm periods and that was generally true through 2002. A period characterized by less total snow cover. In fact such moisture was posited by the skeptics and ridiculed by Warmists until this very winter. Atmospheric moisture can be causative in regional instances. For example the Pineapple Express driving moisture from the Central Pacific to the Cascades or Rockies resulting in very desirable snow cover. It is nonsense on an hemispheric scale. When one has abnormal snow on an hemispheric level it mean the world is colder. Period. Hemispheric cold is caused when the cold moves down from the arctic, not warm weather moving up. Additionally, atmospheric moisture is down 10% over the 20 running norm. This likely means the world is cooler.
It looks increasingly like the skeptics are being proven right and the AGW hypothesis being demonstrably wrong.

You left out important parts of both stories. First, the 2004 Seattle story:
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“We believe there’s some mix between a natural cycle, like El Niño, and a global-warming signal, and one of the key things is to try to separate the two,” said James Morison, the polar-science veteran who heads up the North Pole Environmental Observatory program.
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Now from the Washington Post:
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Over the past two years, the polar vortex has been strikingly unstable, according to meteorological data. James Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cites a couple of measures in particular: One, called the Arctic oscillation, tracks air pressure and related atmospheric variables over the North Pole. The other, the North Atlantic oscillation, takes into account similar variables in the neighborhood of Iceland. Both indexes are reliable indicators of the strength of the polar vortex.

Last winter, both indexes reflected higher air pressures and therefore less vortex stability than scientists have ever recorded. This year, both were again seriously off-kilter.

Any number of meteorological factors contributed to those anomalies. Some were undoubtedly random, Overland says. But he and other experts suspect climate change is contributing to the unusual pattern, and if they’re right, things could get a whole lot worse in the years ahead.
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So what’s your issue with saying that a strong polar vortex along with El-Nino caused Seattle to be warmer and dryer in the winter of 2004? That doesn’t conflict with saying that an unstable polar vortex causes more arctic blasts in the US and Europe.

lol, is that kinda like saying we’re having weather and we don’t know what causes weather? You guys are a hoot!

Here Steve, ……a title for you……New Flash!!!! CO2 causes weather!!!!! It can be hot or cold or wet and dry or hot and cold and wet or dry!!!!! But CO2 causes it and it’s bad!!!! Way different than the stable hot/cold/wet/dry that we used to have!!!!

This is the result of when we passed the law that allows lunatics to sign themselves out of mental hospitals.

It’s getting to the point to where I don’t want them to “shut up”. It seems like every day they expose themselves more and more to the world. They’re starting to just laugh at them. No, they’re not funny, but they should be held up to ridicule and scorn.

I wish I could see the humour in this. All I see is a supine press ready to publish any old tosh as long as it has an alarmist tone. without making any effort to hold people like this to account.
How long can “climate scientists” continue to say…effectively… “I was wrong then but I am definitely right now” and continue to hog the headlines without this salient fly-in-the-infallibility-ointment being even mentioned?
It is depressing, that is what it is. Only a small fraction of the world ever gets to hear about this sort of non-sense. As a consequence alarmism continues to prevail. Present day science journalism is failing us, and showing no sign of ever doing anything else but that.
Climatology’s ability to move the goalposts while the media turn a blind eye means that there would appear to be no end to this insanity.
Having said that….keep up the good work. I try and convince people to look a little deeper into the subject with a more critical eye and whilst my “conversion rate” is slow, it is steady and they are people who are opinion leaders rather than followers. If the battle to damp down alarmism, promote the science, to get people to accept the uncertainties and make sensible political and energy policy is going to be won by gradual one-by-one face to face conversions, we need to get out there in the workplace and the pub and the family gathering and “spread the word”.

Oh how the climate change charlatans now disgrace themselves! It’s understandable, of course. These man-made global warming “snake-oil salesmen” took a punt… they pinned their reputations and integrity to the IPCC’s mantra. And they certainly were riding a crest of a wave as the man-made global warming pandemic swept across the world. But now, these charlatans are having to defend their pseudo-science… all based on the greenhouse gas theory… blaming our CO2 emissions as the the key driver of global warming and climate change. They say global warming causes droughts and hotter weather… global warming causes floods and snow blizzards and all that freezing weather. Amazing!

But one thing is certain… these climate change charlatans, for some unknown reason, never counted on Mother Nature intervening. And intervene she certainly has… exposing the IPCC’s climate computer models for what they are… absolute crap!

Climategate acted as a catalyst in exposing the IPCC’s cabal of “climate scientists” and since then its been like Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall… Humpty Dumpty had a great fall… And now, these climate change charlatans are desperate to put Humpty together again.

To defend their ground to save their reputations, their integrity, their jobs and much more, they have resorted to “climate spin” … having a bob each way making up their “science” as they go along! But it’s now just a matter of time before the door closes on them in light of reports such as the following:

All this new information about Arctic Oscillations, North Atlantic Oscillations, PDO’s, AMO’s, ENSO’s, and on and on, and how they are behaving compared to what they “normally” do, is absurd. What is normal? What variation from the norm is to be expected?

We just do not have an adequate statistical universe to be able to make these learned pronouncements. We suffer from far too much recent, and far too little historic, data. Arctic ice variation since 1979? Please. What was it in 1978, 1878, 1778, 1078, 78, and so on?

Actually this is nothing more than idle conjecture on the part of fast talkers who were able to slick their way into a grant.